When Your Faith is in Force

The latest wizard wheeze from our liberal friends is the plastic straw ban. Because plastic in the oceans, although the plastic in the oceans comes mainly from poor countries that don't pick up their garbage. Kinda like the homeless in Seattle.

And then there is the piece in NRO about the debacle of Liz Warren's favorite wizard wheeze, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was to be a special sovereign agency paid out of the Federal Reserve System with perpetual Democratic directors. What did the Democrats think they were doing?

And then there is the foolish idea of Medicare-for-all, as a perpetual administrative bureaucracy detached from the price system. So what the Democrats really want is VA healthcare for all.

I will tell you what the problem is. These liberals and Democrats and lefties have a saving faith, that politics will heal the sins of the world. Sorry Charlie.  No it won't. Because your gospel of politics is a gospel of force.

That is why I have developed my maxims: Politics is Division, so if you believe in politics you believe in setting Americans against each other. Government is Force, so if you support any government program you are saying that peaceful cooperation has failed, and that the only solution is brute force. And System is Domination, so if you are proposing some administrative solution to a problem you are proposing that only domination and hegemony is the solution.

Now, I was reading a piece from a good Democratic socialist yesterday, and here is what she said.

The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens.

Do you not understand, you foolish woman, that cap-it-al-ism is the best and thus far the only method divined by mankind to do that? All down the agricultural ages the "small handful of citizens" in the ruling elite promoted their needs and the "everyone's needs" went by the board. Then came capitalism and 200 years later even US welfare recipients and sardine fishermen off the west coast of India have smartphones.  Oh yeah. The chaps that brought the smartphones to market have made billions.

Oh, wait. Not quite. The techie chaps are worth billions not because they have socked away the billions in an evil robber-baron castle, but because the market values their companies into the hundreds of billions as it reckons the future profits of the company selling its world-beating technology to the millions.

On the other hand in socialist countries from the Soviet Union to Venezuela the ruling class has made a bundle and the poor have gone  to the wall. How do you like them apples?

Actually, I get this. Because I get that down through the ages, what mattered was the "patch" of land your tribe or nation occupied, with its food-growing potential. Either your group occupied its food-yielding acres or someone else did. Zero-sum world, baby.

But not in the market system. Because now food and resources are universally available for money, and the only question is whether you can offer services on the labor marker or the product market to pay for your food and resources and everything else. Of course you still need to defend your patch of land, your home, from pirates and plunderers. But almost everything is negotiable for money, not by force.

But this only really started 200 years ago. It is still early for everyone to grasp this, and to understand that the utility of force is very clearly circumscribed.

So it is time for foolish Democratic socialists to get with the new world, and shed the failed ideas of the past.

First of all there is the need to avoid invoking force on foolish and petty things, like plastic straws. Government force is only warranted where there is existential peril. Plastic straws don't meet the test.

Secondly, there is the need to let the price system work its magic, making products and services more efficient and less expensive. This cannot happen when products and services are all mewed up by credentials and administrative force, and everything is frozen in place until it breaks catastrophically. Hello health care.

Thirdly, there is the message you are sending to the opposition. When you set up something like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a partisan club to beat the opposition, you are sending the same message as the Bolsheviks: we are in charge, and anyone that disagrees is a saboteur and a wrecker. You really did not intend that, dear liberal friends, did you?

I really don't think that the progressive folks and the Good Little Girls that have been taught to protest really understand what they are saying.

When you want to ban plastic straws, you are saying that you believe in force.

When you want to implement Medicare for All, you are saying you believe in force.

When you set up a regulatory agency so that it cannot be corrected by the opposition party next time it gets in power, you are saying you believe in force.

Surely that can't be true. Because we all believe in Peace.  Correct?

The Power of Nostalgia

One of my Big Ideas is the notion that the left, far from being a progressive force, is in fact a movement of nostalgia, a Great Reaction back to the good old days of perfect community and justice. I suppose that this becomes obvious in the writings of Rousseau and his celebration of the Noble Savage and the opening of his Social Contract: "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." (French: L’homme est né libre, et par-tout il est dans les fers. So, strictly speaking, "fers" should have been translated as "irons.")

But we deplorables would say that the opposite is true. Freedom is not a category in ape society or in hunter-gatherer society. Freedom only gains salience later on. But when?

I know. Let's get all Hegelian and start looking at things through their opposites, in this case, slavery.

Slavery, said someone I read recently, only begins with the agricultural age. Hunter-gatherers, he assumes, did not know slavery. I suppose that is true in the sense that back then in your average dawn raid you would kill all the men and appropriate all the women.

But why not enslave the men and put them to work? I suspect that would be because it was too dangerous. The way I understand it, men did nothing, back in the hunter-gatherer age, except hunt and prepare for war. I don't think that captured men can be trusted to be slave spear-carriers in a hunter-gatherer society where the armed forces are the entire male population. But once agriculture has started and most males are disarmed, or at least not raised as warriors, then you can afford to have subordinate men doing subordinate tasks subject to the overseer and his whip.

But then why does slavery not continue today? Max Weber argued that slavery does not pay in the modern economy. Only when the supply of slaves is plentiful and their price is cheap does slavery make economic sense. Yet clearly in the agricultural age some form of slavery is universal, if we consider feudalism as a form of slavery, where humans are bound to the land of their feudal masters. And feudalism only started to break up when the market economy began to thrive towards the end of the Middle Ages.

 Now, I was reading Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset yesterday and Trollope had some gentlewomen complaining about the men and their devotion to hunting, fishing, and shooting. Do you see what is going on here? The average gentleman of Trollope is installed in a country estate where all the work of managing the agricultural estate is done by others. So the gentleman may do as he pleases, and what he pleases is to revert to hunter behavior, as a pastime. In our age, we have men that enjoy getting up a workshop full of power tools where they can make things, as the craftsman did in olden times before the invention of machine industry.

So it is perfectly natural and physical for humans without a real job to revert to olden times. Of course we would expect Educated Youth of the 19th century to have a nostalgic regard for the good old days of the feudal estate with its comfortable fixed hierarchy about which any young sprig can imagine himself having a paternal and beneficial role.

So, of course, in our modern era, we should expect a huge Great Reaction among foolish young people. Of course we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the corporate hierarchy: people imagine with nostalgia the good old days of feudal security where people actually "belonged" and the master took care of them. Of course we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics: and the comfort of belonging to the kindred. Of course we have the neo-looting-and-pillage of the modern tax system that takes 40 percent of people's work for the ruling class to reward its supporters. Looting and pillage goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers and jolly good fun it was unless you were on the receiving end.

But I remind you of the advice given in Robert Graves I, Claudius to the Roman emperor by an advisor: trust no-one, not even me. Anyone that lives in subordination to a boss, a politician, a general, or a noble lord, is a hostage. His bread and meat come from the fact of his utility to the power project of his superior. But if his utility should ever shrink, or if the superior should lose the war in his power project, well, it is curtains for his supporters.

Thus we have Marx: "A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers[.]" Well of course, because once the feudal lords were forbidden their private armies they didn't need so many workers on their estates.

Thus we have Hobsbawm and Rudé writing about the "protests" of the agricultural laborers being shed by the farmers when the threshing machines came in.

Then we have Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States in 1892 where at the Carnegie Homestead steel plant manager Henry Frick "decided to reduce the workers' wages and break their union." Or, as La Wik puts it: "As the mills expanded, the labor force grew rapidly, especially with less skilled workers. In response, the more-skilled union members reacted with a strike designed to protect their historic position." Of course they did.

Or my own experience, when my employer suddenly laid people off in a business downturn. How could they do this, moaned my co-workers, pointing to the employee manual that spoke about how the bosses cared about the professional development of their employees? No doubt they did care, until their business was threatened by losses.

One thing to remember about almost all "protests" and riots is to look for the guys that are losing a traditional way of life, and resorting to politics and violence to maintain it. Call it the Cornered Rat Syndrome.

 If you are a subordinate then you have hitched your star to someone else's fortune. If they go down, then you go down with them.

So, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything must include something about keeping your powder dry, and your skills up to date, and an emergency kit, and a full tank of gasoline, and so on.

Because when the balloon goes up then it is every man for himself, or, in French, sauve qui peut. And every story you ever heard from another's lips is a survivor story.

And, politicians don't care about you. They only care about your vote.

The antidote to slavery, and going down when your boss goes down, is Freedom and Responsibility. It is the notion that nobody is going to be there for you when it really counts. So you'd better take care of yourself and make sure, as much as possible, that you are not a helpless victim, without an option, without a bolthole, without a way out of Dodge.

Or as I like to say, don't be a "little darling" of the ruling class. Because your nostalgia for the Good Old Days is going to kill you.

Let's Place Our Hope in the Midterms

Today Victor Davis Hanson makes the obvious point that the left's cherished principles lie abused and discarded all about them in the dust. They used to be ready to sink their teeth into police and defense official abuse.  Now they are OK with Obama  using surveillance on the opposition. They used to be absolute in their support the First Amendment and of "dissent" against the official line. Now the left stigmatizes all speech it doesn't like as "hate" speech.

Hanson wonders how they will be able to assert their principles once they regain power again. But I think he is asking the wrong question. The left has always believed that dissent and revolution are only OK for them. Everything  else is reaction or fascism. This has never changed, not from the French Revolution down to the present witch hunts conducted by female diversity administrators on campus.

The point is that ideologues have always believed that all  measures are appropriate to cast out the evil ones.

No, I think the only solution to the currrent left and its eliminationist tactics against anyone to the right of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is to beat the Democrats soundly in the next five elections.

See, right now the left thinks it is going to win the midterms in November 2018, because #Resistance. The lefties are thinking to themselves: wait until we win the House back. Then we will teach Trump a lesson he will never forget.

The only way to shut them up is to beat them in the elections like a drum. And then do it again. That is what taught the left a lesson in the aftermath of the Sixties, and it took a while.

By the way, looking back we can see that the left tried the deep-state method against a duly elected Republican president back then too. Richard Nixon was hounded from office for minor peccadilloes that would never have seen the light of day if he had been a Democrat, and because every Democrat knew that Nixon was evil. Well he must have been because he called Helen Gahagan  Douglas a pinko in the 1948 California Senate election. But the prime time defenestration of Richard Nixon did not teach the Silent Majority a lesson in the 1970s. After a pause  the pushback against the Sixties Kids and their leftist follies resumed with Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate. It was only when the Democrats cried Uncle and said we are all moderates now in 1992 that Bill Clinton could get elected President.  Oh, and by the way, just how much "collusion" was there between Clinton and Ross Perot? I guess we shall never know.

Don't forget that when the Democrats won Congress back in 2006 it was with a pack of moderate congressional candidates that found hard times once they voted for Obamacare in 2010. And Barack Obama ran as a moderate and only turned left after he was elected.

The fact that Obama turned left has to account for a lot of the staggering losses that Democrats have suffered in the election years since 2008.

Really, the  political situation is just the same as in the Sixties. If you are a left-wing kid you get to protest and riot and take down ordinary Americans with a wink and a nod from the lefty academy and media. But if you are a normal or a deplorable you know that anything you say or do against the lefty establishment could lose you your job or your reputation.  Anything.

If you are anyone to the right of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez you know you better keep your mouth shut, or there could be trouble. So what do you do? You keep your head down and then you vote early and often in November 2018.

So here is my prediction for November. If the Democrats underperform their current 5ish point lead in the "generic ballot" then we can assume that the normals and deplorables are angry about the injustice of being oppressed and marginalized by the lefty ruling class. If the Democrats win in November, more or less hitting their marks in the "generic ballot," then we know that the future is Democratic.

My hope is that the Democrats get a bloody nose in November.

See, if they don't then their liberal lefty base is going  to get the message that their lefty #Resistance is working and that they can run over the deplorable opposition without penalty.

That would be a pity, because that gets us a step closer to civil war. You get civil war when the opposition feels that the system is all sewn up, and there is no way for their people to petition the government to get redress of their grievances.

What Comes After Conservatism?

I just whipped through Roger Scruton's latest, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition and I am here to tell you that conservatism is dead.

Scruton's short book leads us through the pre-history of conservatism, to the glory days of Adam Smith and Burke, that reflected and enhanced itself against the liberals like the American founders. Then he talks about the French and German contribution, from Hegel, Chateaubriand and de Maistre; the Hegel bit surprised me. Then we have the cultural conservatives like Arnold, Ruskin, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Then we have the reaction to socialism, in Hayek, Oakeshott, and Burnham.

But what about "Conservatism Now" the final chapter? This is what leads me to say that it is all over with conservatism. Today's (actually yesterday's conservatives) are involved in a fight against political correctness and religious extremism, i.e., Islam. So we are talking about Orwell, Bauer, Buckley, Rand, Kirk, Huntington, and of course Scruton himself.

Yeah. What about it? What has conservatism done for you lately? The truth is that conservatism has become an Outer Party to the left's and the deep state's Inner Party. It is a decorative flourish to the power project of the evolved, educated class.

And so, chaps like you and I have to think about what comes next. And here is what I think. I need we need to mount an ideological movement that can achieve strategic concentration on the religious and cultural and political battlefront with simple pejoratives similar to those the left uses, as in racism! to attack people that don't like racial quotas, sexism! to attack people that don't believe that women should be specially privileged and/or driven out  into careers in their peak child-bearing years, homophobia!  to  attack people who want to privilege the marriage-and-children family, and xenophobia! to attack people that want to maintain and deepen the unique American culture and homeland.

And so, I think, we must start by concentrating our minds on the big questions that human society is designed to engage with, meaning the big questions that our current ruling class has utterly failed to address. The problem with the conservatives over the centuries, as revealed by Roger Scruton, is that the conservative line has always been a half-hearted critique, as in, oh well, we really don't think that the full-on worship of reason is so great. Or, we don't think the full-on bureaucratic-administrative state is the best of all possible worlds.

Meanwhile our liberal friends have been ruthlessly marginalizing us as people that don't care about the workers, that don't care about the blacks, that don't care about women, that don't care about gays. Thus the vile pejoratives  of racist, sexist, homophobes. Oh and don't forget about "hate" and xenophobia. Thus, anyone that disagrees with the Inner Party of the ruling class is cast out into Outer Slobbovia as worse than Hitler.

I say: Enough! So what next?

Obviously, "the best defense is a good offense." That means that it is time to stop whining and apologizing and start attacking.

OK. Great. But what are we attacking for?

Let's go back to first principles. The whole point of human society is to wive, thrive, and survive. There is nothing esoteric about this; we are talking about family and children, jobs and opportunity, and protection from existential peril. But people are not the all the same: that is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to illuminate.

What do the People of the Subordinate Self need? They need a religion and culture that steers them towards making it in the city. That means growing away from the subordinate feudal and slave culture of the agricultural world to the responsibility culture of the city. In other words the whole bourgeois ethos of Axial Age Religion, the bourgeois family, and the responsibility to develop and maintain marketable skills. You want to wive and thrive and survive in the city? Then get with the bourgeois responsibility ethos. You will notice that our present ruling class does not do that good a job at providing a society that leads the immigrants to the city towards these goals, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and unjust treatment of the People of the Subordinate Self.

What do the People of the Responsible Self need? They need to understand that just following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law is not the whole of life; it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What if the world changes? And it will. People need to get a little creative;  otherwise when the world changes you are going to be out of luck. One of the great themes of the left is that when the feudal lords no longer needed soldiers, they just "hurled" the peasants off their estates; when the farmers started using threshing machines they no longer hired agricultural laborers that used to do the threshing by hand: too bad for them; and when the market changed the capitalists just laid off the workers that had built their corporations into world beaters. I argue that a responsible person does not rely on the boss to take care of him. He knows that it is up to him to change with the market.  You will notice that the current ruling class does not do too much to teach the average deplorable to renew their skills and change with the market, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and thoughtless treatment of the People of the Responsible Self.

What do the People of the Creative Self need? They need to understand that there are other people in the world besides themselves and their need to amaze us all. Their current war on Axial Age religion, on the bourgeois family, and their monstrous taxation and regulation of ordinary work is the crime of the century, and the ruling class deserves to be thrown out for its monstrous crimes and injustices. And their current culture of "activism" that they are called to be the Saviors of the marginalized and the oppressed is a pompous self-congratulatory conceit that is all about the need of creative people for meaning and validation and has little to do with the needs of the marginalized and the oppressive. It is fine for creative people to experiment at the margin, but they should be experimenting on themselves and not on the People of the Subordinate and Responsible Self. In particular they should not be trying to mainstream their culture of sexual experimentation. The words of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell still apply.

Her best-known remark, uttered upon hearing about a male homosexual relationship, was "My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses,"

But of course, today the whole point is not just to frighten, but to stampede the horses. You will notice that the current ruling class recklessly advances the class interest of the People of the Creative Self with no regard at all for the needs and inclinations of other people, and this must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their unjust promotion of their own class needs and their open war upon the needs of everyone else.

As you can see, I have thought out the whole campaign, its justification and its goals. All I need are the pejoratives. But I'm thinking about that; I'm thinking!

Yes, But What is Pinker's "Reason" for Being?

With the election of Donald Trump, Canadian born Steven Pinker just couldn't take it any more, and so the thrice-married Pinker has written a book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, to he could show us all what a retrograde oaf the thrice-married Trump was.

Basically, the book argues that everyone is an idiot except educated evolved Harvard professors with gray curly hair (at age 63?) that believe in Reason, Science, and Humanism.

You can tell that people like Pinker are enlightened because they believe in Reason, Science, and Humanism, and fight against racism, sexism, and homophobia. Oh and fascism.

It is only when we get to Chapter 21 that we learn that everyone manipulates Reason to equate with what their tribe believes. So while the real world confounds any "simple narrative" such as ideological conservatives, the left, and the ideological libertarians. However:

I've been arguing that the main drivers [of human progress] were the non-political ideals of reason, science, and humanism which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing.

No "simple narratives" here!

When we finally get to the last Chapter 23: Humanism, we learn that humanism means:

• Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.
• Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change...
• Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.
• Life's fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of human ideals.
• Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.
• Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.

But this is so anodyne to be almost meaningless.

So what you are saying, says my inner Cathy Newman, is that Reason, Science, and Humanism equal the way that we Harvard professors think about the world. Theists can go pound sand because nobody can now seriously believe in God. And the romantic heroes of Nietzsche are a direct road to "authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right." (Yeah! Nobody here but us rationalists and scientists!)

Well, Steven Pinker, I have a kindly and compassionate world view that does not need to condemn everyone that disagrees with me to "bottomless perdition, there to dwell. / In adamantine chains and penal fire, / Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms." I call it my reductive Three Peoples theory.

The idea is that it is perfectly natural and physical for many people to believe in God. In my Road to the Middle Class and elsewhere I argue that the Christian God of divine law and eternal love is just the thing for people making the transition from the country to the city, from agriculture to commerce.

But it is also true that anyone that has plunged into modern science will have a problem with the God of the Bible. That is what Nietzsche was wrestling with. Basically, I understand him saying that, if God is Dead then we will have to invent him, in the Übermensch, whatever that means. Generally, I interpret Nietzsche's notion as the Call of Creativity. If God did not create the world, then we must do so. And creativity is hard, so the creative person -- the "free spirit" or "sacrificial victim" or whoever -- needs to toughen up, because life for the creative person is a Hero's Journey, an exploration of meaning, that is not going to be conducted within the guardrails of society.

One thing that Steven Pinker should ask himself is, if Enlightenment is such a beacon of Reason, Science, Progress, and truth, why was Romanticism the first thing out of the box right after the Age of Reason? Pinker sneers at Romanticism with a jibe against Herder and "feelings." And why are so many people captivated by Marxism, old and new? And why is theism still as strong as it is? Why are people attracted to the neo-tribalism of labor unions? And why do people that have rejected God flock to "spirituality" cults?

I will tell you, Steven Pinker. The fact is that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is still, 200 years after the Enlightenment, a mystery. I like to say that it is more of a mystery than it used to be, because every advance in knowledge just raises new questions.

But each of us must live in the here and now, eons before we finally (if ever) find out the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. That means that we must make a decision about the meaning of life, right now. Hence God. Hence religion. Hence Marxism. Hence the alt-right.

Or, if you are a romantic hero, you can make your whole life about the search for meaning.

It is understandable that a chap like Steven Pinker wouldn't get this. Life is pretty good for a Harvard professor with a solid record of research and a string of popular bestsellers. And three wives, just like Donald Trump. What is best in life for Steven Pinker is a world where smart Jewish kids get to be professors and do research and write popular bestsellers extolling Reason, Science, and Progress.

Any change is likely to end up making life worse for a chap like Steven Pinker.

By the way, Pinker mischaracterizes Edmund Burke, writing that Burke "suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss." That's not quite what Burke said, old chum. Let's just say that Burke thought we humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving other peoples' condition, that such schemes tended to lead straight to "the gallows," as indeed they did not, because by then the French had replaced the hangman's gallows with Madame la Guillotine. Know what I mean?

President Trump: Bumbler or Genius?

Yesterday President Trump had a negotiating session with EU bigwig Jean-Claude Juncker, and at the end of it the twain announced that they were stepping back from the brink of trade war. Looks pretty good, eh? Not to the The New York Times:

It was hard to say, given Mr. Trump’s bluster and unpredictable negotiating style, if the agreement was a genuine truce or merely a lull in a conflict that could flare up again. Twice, Mr. Trump’s aides have negotiated potential deals with China, only to have him reject them and impose further tariffs. Cutting these trade barriers to zero would be an extraordinarily complex political challenge on both sides of the Atlantic.

Oh dear oh dear. That Trump! No chance for a quick one before lunch at the bar of the Conventional Wisdom Club when he is around!

And just in case you didn't get the message here's another piece from the Times: "Europe Avoids a Trade War with Trump, But Can It Trust Him?" I can imagine how the Times feels. I feel the same way about liberals. We've avoided a civil war with liberals so far, but can we trust them? Certainly not if it comes to the instinctive resort to pejoratives like racist, sexist, homophobe by our liberal friends. And today the Times reports that the Mueller investigation is probing Trump's tweets. Boy! No there's a problem!

Never mind about the lads in the bar at the Conventional Wisdom Club. What about the Chinese?

What do the Chinese think about Trump? They have been talking to the Financial Times, and this is what they say they think, according to Marginal Revolution. First off, they "are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician[.}" No kidding! I thought he was a blowhard reality show star!

Want some more?

In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

No kidding! I mean, why would any rational and educated and humanist Enlightenment Now person want to renegotiate the world order? Hey, if it was good enough for FDR and Alger Hiss at Yalta, and Harry Truman and George "Containment" Kennan in the Cold War, what's not to like!

Only, of course, things were different in the Cold War. The idea, if you recall, was to "contain" the Stalinist Soviet Union, a country, for you AOC fans, that killed at least 10 million in the Ukraine famine, and millions more in the Gulag, etc. So our military and economic policy was founded on the idea of embracing Europe with our military strength and building it back up after the devastation of war. Because it benefited us.

But because the ruling class is usually composed of idiots and time servers, there was no sensible redefinition of our global strategy after the Cold War was well and truly won in 1989 and the Soviet Union cried Uncle, and last week what looks like millions of Russians observed the centenary of the assassination of the Czar.

So what sort of military alliances should we have? Yes, you got me. I really don't have a clue.

So what sort of economic trade deals should we have? Hey, you got me. I really don't have a clue.

But here we have the Chinese that say that they think that President Trump is in the middle of an episode of "creative destruction" to renegotiate the terms of trade in our favor.

Of course, they may not really think that. They may, inscrutable Orientals that they are, be playing a much deeper game than that. They may think that Trump is going to crash and burn on his present course, and so they want to encourage him to drive off the cliff. Who knows?

But my guess is that the Chinese ruling class are idiots, just like our ruling class are idiots. Their ruling class seems to be reverting to pre-20th century strategy with their Belt and Road initiative, which is already running into problems with its client countries failing to make payments. Is that a good idea? Well, my guess is probably not. Most all government programs are a mess, and just waste resources for little gain. And I expect that the Belt and Road initiative, which is a return to the ancient imperial Chinese policy of client states, is no different.

And our ruling class is just as clueless. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now is really just an apology for today's liberal ruling class. Yeah, everything is great and a tribute to reason and science and humanism. Except that, when we finally get to Chapter 21: Reason, we learn that people are totally tribal and rationalize anything if their tribe believes in it. So Pinker waves a hand over the welfare state and declares it to be good. Like 25 percent of government spending on the poor. Well, he would, because his tribe is all in favor of the welfare state.

OK. But in Captain Swing, our worthy lefties Hobsbawm and Rudé (rhymes with Egbert Sousé, know what I mean?) excoriate the Brits of 1830 for humiliating and abandoning the agricultural laborers to the Poor Law and the Speenhamland plan. So what does it mean to abandon the white working class to the tender mercies of the global economy, Stevie? So what does it mean to have millions on millions of poor people out of the labor market and not contributing to the national economy? I'd call that a bloody failure. But Pinker just regards it as proof of our compassion, or rationality,  or something.

Same thing on foreign policy. What about NATO? What is its purpose now that Russia is no longer a world-conquering behemoth? And now that Germany is back as No.1 in Europe by a country mile and a bratwurst? And why are we obsessing on Russia, Russia, Russia, when if anyone is pushing for World Domination it is China? Hey, I'd say it is time for a president that hasn't been marinating in the bar at the ruling class Conventional Wisdom Club for most of his adult life.

Here's my take. Most of the time, in my view, politicians, bureaucrats, academicians, and activists are idiots. That means that they tend to bumble into foolish mistakes that we the people have to pay for.

But occasionally you get a guy that really stands out from the crowd. You can tell he is exceptional because the usual suspects think he is not quite out of the top drawer. Bismarck. Lord Salisbury.  OK, so those guys were out of the top drawer. But then Calvin Coolidge, "weaned on a pickle," Margaret Thatcher, the grocer's daughter, Ronald Reagan, an "amiable dunce."

Is Donald Trump out of the Coolidge, Thatcher, Reagan drawer?  We don't know. Call back in about ten years and we'll know.

Of course, by then I might be dead.

Meaning and the Three Peoples

I am reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, loaded for bear because, like so many people, Pinker does not understand about values and meaning. When you say, as almost everyone does, that you believe in facts and reason and the other guys believe in feelings and emotion, you don't understand.

People bring to the table not fact and reason but their "religion," their world view about what the world is and what it means and what "my life" means in consequence. Steven Pinker believes instinctively in what he takes to be the value system of the Enlightenment, which is that prosperity, freedom, rights, knowledge, safety, are Good Things, whereas religion, conformity, priestly authority, and the marginalization of black people, women, and gays are Bad Things.

Now I have written previously about "What Gods do the 'Three Peoples' Believe In?'," but I haven't really written about Meaning and the Three Peoples, or how each of the Three Peoples finds meaning in life.

But yesterday an email acquaintance explained the whole procedure to me.

[I]f you identify as, say, a BDSM Submissive, but you don’t have a concrete cosmic philosophy about the outside world, then who you are is literally the center of your conceptualized universe. The endangerment of whatever aspect of yourself you most strongly identify AS, is a threat to your whole existence. 

Or, to rephrase in my Three Peoples talk, if you are a subordinate worker or peasant, your whole life falls apart when the lord or the boss says: Sorry, I don't need you to work my fields, or bend tin in my factory anymore; good luck, pal. The meaning of life for a People of the Subordinate Self is all bound up in your physical usefulness to your lord or patron.

Then my correspondent talks about herself:

Contrast that with how I understand MYself as a being entity that exists in a universe to be explored in order to discover its meaning, and in doing so, MY meaning as a member of it that exists within its rules. 

Wow. Do you see what she is saying? She is saying that she discovers meaning by living her life as an exploration of the world. This means that meaning is not already discovered on the tablets, immutable for all time, as religions and ideologies insist, but a mystery to be examined and perhaps understood. This is what meaning means for the People of the Creative Self: meaning is something you explore and discover for yourself, as is proposed in the myth of the Hero's Journey.

And that, I now realize, is what Nietzsche is saying in Also Spake Zarathustra. You must go out into the world and explore it, and get beyond the comfortable certainties of Good and Evil.

But also she is telling us the point of traditional religion and culture; they provide a handhold for the day when your physical world falls apart. She is saying is that the SJWs and identity activists with their victim culture are like BDSM submissives. They have no anchor in a saving religion and its culture apart from their direct instinctive experience.

And this is in my opinion, a key to the difference between conservative students and identity activists on campus. The former is oriented and anchored. Due to a variety of reasons. I suspect, the influences of religion, internalized cultural heritage linked to geography and nation, intact procreating families that cement the child’s early idea of identity around intangible, eternal, enduring love and its effect. The latter on the other hand, is precariously tethered. For the first time, SJWs have my real sympathy. 

 I interpret this to mean that, if you are a People of the Responsible Self, with an Axial Age religion to stiffen your spine, your identity does not collapse when your current status as a peasant or a worker collapses or when someone microaggresses you. You just pick yourself up and say, well, I've gotta suck it in and find another way to earn my living. The meaning of your life is already secured in your religious and cultural faith, and so life goes on.

Right now I am reading a lefty tome by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé about the miseries of English agricultural laborers that culminated in the Captain Swing riots of 1830. The landless laborers had been kept on because they could be employed in manual threshing of harvest during the winter, but their wages had to be supplemented by welfare. Once mechanical threshing machines were invented, the farmers dumped the laborers and that was that. The only thing the laborers could think of doing was rioting and smashing up the threshing machines. And Hobsbawm and Rudé are right there with them. How could the farmers pay them such low wages? How could they humiliate them with the Speenhamland System of outdoor relief? Activism! Protest! That's the answer!

The answer of history, of course, was Shakespearean: get thee to a factory, where, starting in about 1850 workers started experiencing the growth in real wages that, a few economic revolutions later, has brought us to where we are today.

I should explain that my correspondent is recovering from a traumatic brain injury, and has directly experienced that "who I am, my personality and soul, can be shut 'down.'" Now she is experiencing the world anew as "my ability of processing the outside world has come back in increments," an exploration of meaning.

So here is what I have learned from my correspondent. The meaning of life for the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, is bound up in the physical day-to-day life of subordinate work, and collapses if the work is taken away. The meaning of life for the People of the Responsible Self is encoded in religion and culture and is taken to be immutable reason and logic. The meaning of life for the People of the Creative Self is a journey of discovery, usually involving a descent into the underworld (of the unconscious), and meaning is something discovered in the journey.

Makes sense to me. Steven Pinker, not so much.